These are not legitimate comparisons. They are largely insignifcant when it comes to the world stage. Denmark has less people than New York City.
You can’t judge a country when it is essentially a non-actor. “Oh, Denmark’s never invaded anyone!” Well no crap, they can’t. Although, in reality, Denmark actually did colonize various other parts of the world and oppressed those indiginous peoples.
No, we didn’t. The US did not kill a million Iraqis. That’s not even remotely close to reality.
I’d say you’re moving the goalposts. Both Denmark and Iceland are nations. If you don’t want to count countries you say don’t dominate the world stage, then you’ve already presupposed the answer to the question you’re asking. It could very well be that dominating the world stage is the problem, the thing that causes the US to be worse than Denmark or Iceland.
Beyond that, why are you considering Denmark’s history when judging them? That isn’t the question you asked, and if history matters, I imagine in pure body counts Denmark is still far better than the US.
Pick your own body count for Iraqi civilians, and explain how killing that many people for a blunder or a lie amounts to having ‘consideration’ for them.
The problem is the strange dichotomy and ambivalence about the outside world America has.
America might be the land of the free, but America doesn’t have a clear sense of “bringing” freedom to the non-free. It sounds good on the tin, but most people have the barest shred of understanding of the world outside of the US, and aren’t really capable of judging whether the actions the government takes are good or bad… if they even are aware of those actions at all.
Half the population of the US had no desire to enter WW2, and a significant minority preferred Germany to Britain and France. It was really just an Old Money New England chap that dragged American rather unwillingly into it, and even then almost too late. When Wilson tried to create an international system, the Congress immediately rejected it.
Foreign policy in the Cold War US quickly declined after Vietnam - and Conservatives never forgave the cultural and political loss of standing Vietnam caused and the subsequent social revolutions that sprang out of it. US foreign policy shifted from being direct to indirect, from draft to volunteer, and the US citizens subsumed themselves in consumerism and culture war identities and more or less forgot about the rest of the planet. Most US people in the 80s or 90s probably cared far more about what band they liked than what’s going on in China or South America. In that void cynical manipulators willing to throw countries into chaos as long as no Ameircan blood was spilled dominated the black box of foreign policy, able to have enormous and outsized influence across cultures and areas with the barest shred of awareness from the general public.
This pretty much culmonates into the first and second Iraq wars, with the cynics driving US policy even to self-defeating actions. The rationale of neoconservatism in the 70s and 80s that no amount of foreign blood was too much in the drive to indirectly stop Communism morphed into conclusion no amount of foreign chaos was too much if the US was never attacked again. By Iraq 2 US foreign policy had been “the bad guys” from the perspective of most of the world. Virtually all foreign policy today by the US has little to no regard for the vision of Roosevelt and Wilson of a paternalistic world order built on humanitarian ideals.
Today a lot of people talk about the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave, but they have no clear conception - if they think about it at all - how this relates to the outside world. They barely understand how it relates to their political ideals at home, after all.
To be fair, Iceland is basically a giant Swiss Family Robinson.
But you can’t judge an actor on the basis of not taking actions which are literally impossible for them to take.
Again, in terms of Denmark, they actually did colonize and oppress other parts of the world. So, even with their minimal ability to act on the world stage, they STILL did that.
If you had the US withdraw into itself, and just leave the world stage, then you’re going to be left with those other nations which have that kind of global power… mainly China and Russia. And I am exceedingly confident that they would be worse for everyone involved.
Because the criticism of the US presented was using the US history of things like slavery.
You’re demonstrating that you have a perspective that is entirely disconnected from reality. You’re blaming the US for deaths directly caused by the opponents of the US.
It’s like blaming the Allies in WWII for all the people the Axis murdered.
If I’m fighting you, and then you turn and shoot some innocent person in the head, that’s YOUR fault, not mine. I didn’t kill that person, you did.
When evaluating the US consideration for civilians, you can look at our actual military operations, and the attempts to avoid civilian casualties whenever possible.
Oh, absolutely.
When Denmark was out colonizing and oppressing they were probably a pretty major player on the world stage.
I think he’s comparing body counts with and without US intervention. Blowback is exactly the rise of elements antithetical to US interests because of ill-considered actions. The claim of the neocons was that intervention there would benefit the region. A million deaths and the rise of ISIS suggest that claim was ludicrously wrong.
Operation Condor is really the final word for me on the U.S.'s moral standing. We trained regimes to kidnap, torture and murder their own people. We operated black torture sites during the Iraq war. We still have people interred at Guantanamo outside any legal jurisdiction. Chattel slavery in the U.S. was uniquely cruel in world history. We displaced and murdered the indigenous folks who lived here before Europeans. We’ve almost never been the first nation to grant a civil right, extend suffrage, abolish slavery, promote freedom. What is good about us?
Life’s not a Hollywood movie.
That’s what I mean by presupposing the answer. You’re basically saying that, of the half-dozen or so countries capable of engaging in large-scale aggressive war, the US engages in the least bad aggressive war. While that may very well be true, I think that’s a poor way to judge the morality of a nation, and saying that the toughest bully on the stage is marginally more reserved than the others isn’t the same thing as saying he’s a good guy.
If you compare their entire histories, Denmark looks better. If you compare their present incarnations, Denmark looks better. Adding Denmark’s history doesn’t help your case.
I’m blaming the aggressor. The US was the aggressor in the second Iraq war. The US was not the aggressor in the Second World War. Don’t we typically blame the aggressor for the consequences?
Arguably the big difference is the rule of law and the guarantees of personal freedom.
The wiggle room in which practical injustice in the US operates is the legal justifications under which it is cloaked. Russia might have freed the serfs, but it was not by law but by fiat. And they could have just as easily re-enslaved the serfs by fiat again, had they wanted. At least in the US the theory that your rights are defended and defensible by law is what separates the US from just the ordinary din of squabbling nations until recently.
If the law itself is unjust, otoh, the US has a much harder time splitting the hairs from legality from morality.
Conservatives are hyper sensitive to legal injustice in the US even at the cost of allowing injustice in practice, but aren’t concerned with the knock on consequences. Even today DeVos is increasing protections for those accused of rape in college campuses - the thought that even one person was falsely convicted is intolerable to the Conservative mind.
The reason there are millions of black men in jail is because (most of them probably) broke the law. The question is whether the punishment fits the crime, and whether the crime is or is not just. The US has a very Javert-ish view of the world, by and large.
But it kind of does.
Judgement is based on the choices we make. If you are not given a choice, then you can’t be judged on it.
When Denmark had the opportunity to invade and oppress others, they did. Basically every group of humans throughout history did. Denmark didn’t really get better in this regard… they just got weaker.
No, that’s silly.
You blame the people who killed people.
The US, for example, is responsible for firebombing Tokyo. We’re responsible for those deaths.
We are not responsible for the terrorists, who we were fighting against, killing civilians.
Otherwise you collapse upon an infinite recursion of blame. Oh, Hussein is responsible, since he took actions that made us invade him! Oh, the British are responsible, because they colonized that region and fucked it up! Oh, the Romans are responsible! The Persians! The Mesopotamians! Dinosaurs!
Yet the Constitution is chock full of amendments, and the US legal code even more full of laws, that turned out to be necessary because the Constitution didn’t guaranteed the rule of law and personal freedom for everyone. It it’s inception, the protections of the Constitution were afforded to a very narrow portion of the populace, and two centuries later there are still classes of people denied many of its (amended) protections.
And yet…
Sure but they never conceived of those people as being capable of receiving justice. The scope of who “the people” were has always been increasing both in US and world history.
I will say that most people at the time recognized the hypocrisy of the Southern states w/re to slavery and the compromises made by the North in order to unite the country. And that tension between profit and justice is, in many ways, the sociopolitical division in the US even today. Virtually all anti Republican position, when you dig down, are just about taxes and making money (climate change, private prisons, gun control, price of oil, ect.) with a veneer about freedom and liberty.
The fact that the US has continued to evolve its constitution to expand rights to previously disenfranchised groups is a feature, not a bug.
This is no longer an argument for American exceptionalism, then. When we have been able to do these things, we have done them, just like everyone else.
Yet most soldiers never kill anyone. Political leaders never kill anyone. So that doesn’t really work, and the way we aportion blame is necessarily more abstract than that; nor is blame an indivisible quantity. By way of example, by all accounts some Ukriainians happily joined in the Holocaust and helped perpetrate the Holocaust within their borders. Do you not still blame the Nazi occupiers for those deaths? I certainly do.
The Magna Carta established rule of law in the 13th century. England had guaranteed trial by jury by the 14th century. They had widespread habeas corpus by the 17th century and a Bill of Rights by 1689.
This consideration applies only to rape and police who shoot people. Conservatives make this determination, not on principle, but based on the predilections of their political tribe.
Certainly some of them broke the law. But the law is applied unequally by race. That is indisputable.
Oh absolutely. But they are not rounding up millions of black men and arresting them on false charges, as in Soviet Russia (and on a lesser scale, modern Putin’s Russia), or on suspicion of anti-government sentiment as in China. Although, don’t get me wrong, surely thousands of black men have been dragnet’ed into crimes by racist police forces or prosecutors over the decades.
It’s much harder to get across to Conservatives something is unjust when the action is clearly illegal. It’s why the only thing the Republicans cared about in the Kavanaugh hearings was not whether what he did was immoral but illegal, it’s why the only thing that worries Trump is legal action, not being immoral.
What it means is that the bar for exceptionalism isn’t where you thought it was. You do not need to be perfect to be exceptional.
The US has had unparalleled military and economic might throughout the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, and while its actions then were not perfect, they did in fact demonstrate a sense of morality which was not present in the actions of other nation states which were faced with those same types of choices.
This is not a good argument. Clearly, we are talking about the actions of the controlling entities, not down to the granularity of individual soldiers.
The Ukranians perpetuating the holocaust were acting under the orders of the Nazis.
Terrorists in Iraq were not acting under the orders of the US. They were acting directly against the US. You cannot reasonably assign blame to someone for the actions of the enemy they are actively trying to stop.
Except when we’re talking about abortion, gay marriage, or teenagers having sex. They called themselves the Moral Majority. They demonized liberals for “relativism.” Conservatives do not have principles. They have tribal predilections guided by a propaganda machine.